There has been a lifetime's worth of ludicrous commentary spawned by Mike Rice's video scandal, but the most dangerous remarks were made by Rick Pitino, who is on the verge of leading Louisville men's basketball to a national championship.

"I don't think there's a coach alive that does that, what you witnessed," Pitino told a throng of national media in Atlanta before the Final Four. "I don't think you have to worry about that."

And there is the problem. Pitino wants to sweep this under the rug, pretend it is isolated, a freak occurrence. Nothing to see here folks, go back to your pom-poms and bracket pools.

That may be the case in Pitino's fantasy world, but the picture is much different here at ground zero.

Several Rutgers basketball players past and present have told me they weren't much bothered by Rice because they had played under other coaches who acted in similar fashion. And many regular folks approached me last week saying they grew up with coaches just like Rice.

One Division I coach said that while Rice is on the far end of the spectrum, he's not alone. If every coach's worst practice moments over two years were compiled into a three-minute montage and aired on ESPN, this veteran coach said, a quarter of them would resign or be fired.

So Rice is not the extreme outlier Pitino would have you believe. That leads us to thornier ground. There is a larger cultural issue at hand, and it's time for a widespread discussion about it.

Driven by pride, adrenaline, the specter of big money and a degree of zealotry, we accept behavior from coaches that we would never tolerate from a teacher in a classroom or a colleague in a workplace.

I'm not talking about shouting gay slurs or throwing basketballs at players' heads or kicking or shoving people. We all agree that's out of bounds. As a college basketball beat writer who attended Rice's practices once a week for three seasons, I never saw or heard any of those things. Not once.

I did see Rice dropping F-bombs in players' faces and flying in and out of raging fits. But in the same practices I also saw Rice putting his arm around players during water breaks, and joking with them – and them joking back – as they walked off the floor for the day.

On balance I thought it was harsh, but did not think of it as extreme or especially noteworthy for a reason: I see the same things at high school football and basketball games all the time.

Now it needs to be said: Not all coaches curse and rage at players. In fact, the majority do not. But enough do, and often in plain sight of fans, that there can be only one conclusion: Within the culture of high-profile sports these things are accepted as part of the deal.

As such most of us on the inside – beat writers like myself included – have been co-opted by the culture. Tim Pernetti resided deep inside that bubble for a long time, and that probably clouded his ability to see how badly the Rice video would play out in public when it inevitably got there.

The smartest and most honest statement I've seen about the scandal came from someone knee-deep in it.

"I hope that coaches on all levels learn something important from these events," said former Rutgers assistant Jimmy Martelli, who resigned Wednesday after the video showed him pushing players.

We should heed Martelli's words and ignore Pitino's. It's easier to dismiss Rice's video as rogue than to address the culture that spawned it. As someone who played a part in that culture, I say it's time to talk.